Irish President Is Re-Elected, but a Reality Star Surges

DUBLIN — Ireland’s leftist president, Michael D. Higgins, easily won a second term Saturday despite a late surge by a former reality show celebrity whose support soared after he criticized an ethnic minority group.

In a separate ballot, voters also appeared ready to abolish a constitutional ban on blasphemy. The vote count was still underway Saturday night, but exit polls suggested that around 70 percent of voters supported repealing the ban, which in practice had never led to a prosecution.

Higgins’ re-election to the presidency, a largely ceremonial position, was never really in doubt and he won comfortably with about 56 percent of the vote. But the gains made by Peter Casey, a former panelist on Ireland’s “Dragon’s Den” reality show, drew considerable attention in the final days of the race.

Casey saw his support leap from 2 percent in opinion polls conducted two weeks ago to about 23 percent in the election itself, lifting him from last in the six-candidate pack to second.

The dramatic rise in support for Casey, 61, a businessman, followed the release of a podcast interview in which he criticized the Irish Travellers’ official status as an ethnic minority, recognized by Parliament last year.

The Travellers are a traditionally nomadic indigenous group. Ethnically Irish in origin, they are believed to have diverged from the general population many generations ago, developing their own variant of the Irish dialect and culture.

Casey had said the Travellers were “basically people camping in someone else’s land” and that their separate ethnic status was nonsense. He also accused the Travellers of failing to pay taxes and of driving down home prices.

“The Casey vote shows that Ireland, like any other Western country, is not immune from the populism we are seeing around the world,” said Noel Whelan, a political analyst. “The tactic he used was the same one we’ve seen in America and elsewhere, where you attack a vulnerable element of society and accuse them of being ungrateful and causing social problems.”

Casey was one of three panelists from the “Dragon’s Den” to run in the election. All three had argued that their experience as businessmen would help them to do a better job as president than Higgins, an academic, poet and former parliamentarian for the center-left Labour Party.

In the last presidential election, in 2011, one of those reality show celebrities, Sean Gallagher, came close to defeating Higgins. Gallagher, who is also a former fundraiser for the center-right Fianna Fail Party, finished third this time.

In an impassioned speech at Dublin Castle on Saturday night, Higgins said voters had faced stark decisions about the “character of our Irishness.”

“The people have made a choice as to which version of Irishness they want reflected at home and abroad,” he said. “It is the making of hope they wish to share, rather than the experience of any exploitation of division or fear.”

The results were a setback for Sinn Fein, the former political wing of the Irish Republican Army. The party ignored the long-standing convention against challenging presidential incumbents seeking second terms, putting forward a candidate to test its national strength.

Its candidate, Liadh ní Riada, finished fourth with only about 6 percent of the vote, considerably less than the party’s 14 percent support overall in the most recent national survey.

The absence of any heavyweight challenger to Higgins was reflected in the turnout, which was down by a third from the 64.5 percent who came out earlier this year for the referendum that abolished Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion.

The blasphemy vote was more symbolic than practical. No one has ever been prosecuted for blasphemy in modern Ireland, but rights groups said that the existence of the ban was used by repressive governments to argue in support of their own restrictions.

In the lead-up to the vote, the Catholic Church weighed in to say that the Irish constitutional clause was “largely obsolete.”